Now my Olympus OM-D
E-M1 is back again, time for lots of photos, including the weekly “house photo” series. That required setting manual
focus. But it didn't work! It looked as if the other wheel was jamming.

Oh yes, it did. But it took a delay of nearly one second, and it's repeatable. That's not
the only issue: entering the setup menu now takes 3 seconds. Leaving it again takes 5.
What have they done?

As if that wasn't bad enough, while taking photos in the evening, the shutter release was
also very slow. It sounded like the shutter was being released twice, about 0.3 s apart.
That's just what you want from a fast camera. In the end I took Yvonne's E-PM2, which worked normally.

The setup: manual exposure, flash trigger and studio flash. The same problem didn't happen
when I was taking the house photos, also with manual exposure.

What's going on here? Olympus updated the
firmware in my camera, without being asked, to release 3.1. In principle that makes sense,
but it really looks as if there's something seriously wrong with the firmware. It's
possible that some obscure undocumented function is causing the problem, but it's not
obvious what: I had only made specific
changes to the defaults, and none seemed to apply. But then, Olympus have made
undocumented or barely documented changes to the functionality. For example, there are no
release notes or updated documentation for release 3.1, but on the download page they
write:

The "Live View Boost 2" function was added.

What does that mean? They're far too polite to say. Looking at the menus, the entire area
has changed. In the last manual (2.0) they write:

Live View Boost If [On] is selected, priority will be given to making images
clearly visible; the effects exposure compensation and othe settings will not be visible
in the monitor.

And that's all. Release 3.0 has a vestigial release note, half a page each in 3 languages,
explaining that C-AF now works at up to 9 fps, and how to set it (no change from
previous releases). But now I see that there are four different scenarios for setting live
view boost: Manual Shoting, Bulb/Time, Live Composite, Others. What's Live Composite?
Again, no word. The only clue is in the irritating popup in the setup menus. It seems that
there's also an “On1”—clearly they've run out of terms to explain the difference. From the
popups:

On1: Live View brightness will not reflect exposure settings and will be adjusted
for optimal viewing. Brightness of final image will differ.

On2Live View brightness will not reflect exposure settings and will be adjusted
for optimal viewing w/- slow frame rate for dark areas. Brightness of final image will
differ.

So it's “slow frame rate”, whatever that means. Maybe that explains the smearing I'm now
seeing in the viewfinder.

All in all, I'm not at all happy. This is an expensive camera. It should work, especially
after coming back from service. Grrr.

More rain overnight, and heavy winds. How much rain? 3.8 mm or 7.8 mm, depending on the
rain gauge. I've been puzzled about the discrepancy in the past, but then the discrepancies
have always been less than 2 mm. Now it's 4. Does this have something to do with the wind?

Our cat Lilac is now coming on 19 years old.
Yvonne tells me that she's looking feeble. I can't say that
she looks like a young cat any more, but on the whole she doesn't look too bad. But lately
it has become apparent that she's stone deaf: no reaction at all unless she can see you.
Today she was outside, meowing at the door to come in. By the time I got there, she had
turned away, and didn't respond to being called—until she turned around. And when she's
sitting on my lap, I can clap my hands behind her head, and she doesn't react.

I suppose there could be worse problems, like the bouts of incontinence that she has
experienced.

Chris Bahlo along to dinner this evening, bringing Fjodor with her. To his credit, he
didn't crap on the floor this time, just lifted his leg against the potted lemon tree.
Clearly he needs to understand indoors better.

Woke this morning to hear Zhivago screaming.
That's not uncommon for Borzois: they may
not bark much, but the slightest pain causes them to scream. But Yvonne told me it had been going for some time, and he was lying in his basket
looking very sorry for himself, and we couldn't get him to get up—attempts caused just more
screaming. Called Pene Kirk, who came almost immediately, considering the 20 km distance
she had to drive.

Based on our description, I think she was half prepared to put him down, but she diagnosed
some pain in his upper spine, gave him a painkiller and an antiinflammatory, and in due
course he was up and about. We won't know until tomorrow whether it was just the
painkiller, or for 3 days until the antiinflammatory works off, but things are not as bad as
they seemed.

Zhivago wasn't the only problem this morning.
After we had looked at him, Yvonne told me we were off the
net. Again! How do I even contact Aussie Broadband to tell them? It proved that I did have adequate mobile phone
coverage in the garden (out towards Wendy's house), and I left a message. Of course network
connectivity came back before anybody seemed to have looked at it again, but it was still
nearly 70 minutes without coverage.

What was the cause? I've had (a very few) cases where
the NTD status indicators showed some
connectivity problem with the tower, but here there were no problems. And although I
religiously power cycled the NTD, it made no difference, and when connectivity did come back
again, it was not due to anything that I did.

This was the longest outage since we've been in Stones Road, but by no means the only one:
we've had 41 outages in 87 days, or nearly one every 2 days. Whose fault is it? Who
monitors the net? Nobody can tell me. It's about time to raise awareness. Sent off a
request to Aussie to address the issue.

It's been 90 days since the handover of the house, a day before expiry of the 13 week Defect Liability Period.
Last week JG King should have arranged
for and performed an inspection of the house. Of course they didn't.

Nearly 3 weeks ago Evan
(surname unknown) and Wayne Jones of JG King came to address the other issues, in particular
the slow problem resolution. So far not a single issue has been resolved. The only action
I have seen was the arrival of Craig from City to Surf Whitegoods, who confirmed that the range hood could hold a piece of A4 paper against the centre
filter of the hood (but not against the other two). So he reported back that the unit was
functional. No explanation that it couldn't even hold the paper on the side panels, nor how
this related to the claimed throughput of 214 l/s.

Yesterday I sent Wayne an email asking for final dates for resolution of the problems.
Today I got a call from him: the range hood was OK, the gaps under the doors would be
addressed by Greg of Delta,
who would also fix various issues with the trim, and the stove would be discussed at my
meeting with Electrolux tomorrow. And
Trevor would contact me about the defect liability period inspection.

Only: the range hood is not OK. Greg contacted me—he hadn't done so last
Thursday—and confirmed that he knew nothing about the gaps under the doors, but could
provide some help, up to a difference of 2 mm height—nothing like what we need. He'll come
along tomorrow at 16:00 and take a look.

And Electrolux? This was the first I had heard of a meeting with them. But not the first
time that Wayne had claimed that we had arranged a meeting about which I knew nothing.

A call from Rob[iy]n from Electrolux later in the morning. Unfortunately the technician's
father was in hospital, and he had taken the day off, so could we put it off until next
week? No, we bloody couldn't. I've been complaining about this stove for 3 months now, and
nothing has happened. Yes, I strongly suspect that Wayne had only just contacted them, but
that's not my problem. Why don't they just take it back and refund the costs? But no, she
found that they could come on Thursday, at a time that they would negotiate later.

Then a call from Trevor of JG King to (belatedly) do the defect liability period inspection.
He'll be along on Thursday at 11:00, hopefully not the time that the Electrolux people
choose.

So: the email seems to have had its effect. But why was it necessary? At the very least I
get a strong impression that Wayne is not monitoring progress effectively, if at all.

It's becoming clear that I'm going to have a dispute about the range hood. I strongly doubt
the good will of all involved: the first time they sent somebody
by, he confirmed that the thing wasn't working correctly. But they reported that all was
working normally. Then the second time the technician
measured the wrong parameter, found it wanting, and reported that everything was OK.

What neither of these people did was to measure the actual air flow. OK, I can do that.
The correct way to do it is with an air speed meter, equipped with
a Pitot tube, but they're expensive
(though not expensive enough to explain why the manufacturer doesn't have one). But I can
get a cheap anemometer for $14. It's
not as accurate, but it can certainly give a good idea of the order of magnitude, which I'm
sure would be way off from the specifications, so I ordered one.

So what am I measuring? The specifications state an air flow of 770 m³/h, corresponding to 214 l/s or 0.214 m³/s
in the metric system. The ducting is 15 cm in diameter, so even ignoring compression
effects and boundary layers (both
of which reduce real throughput), to move that much through the duct would require a wind
speed of 0.214 ÷ (π . 0.015² ÷ 4) or 12.1 m/s. That's about 44 km/h.

Is that reasonable? Compared the air conditioner reverse air. It's rated for a maximum of
1000 l/s, and the reverse air duct is 62 by 66 cm, or 0.4 m². The air flow through the duct
should be 2.5 m/s, or 9 km/h. But it's much stronger than the flow through the range hood.

Of course, it's difficult to measure the air flow at this point in the range hood. I'd have
to take the ducting apart. But there's also the filter surface on each device. On the
range hood it's three insets 26×28 cm in size, or a total of 0.22 m². For the air
conditioner, it's two insets 1.46×0.38 m, or 1.1 m². So at maximum rate the air flow is
0.214 ÷ 0.22, or pretty much 1 m/s for the range hood, and 1 ÷ 1.1 or 0.9 m/s for the air
conditioner.

How do they compare? At full fan, the air conditioner attracts an A4 sheet of paper from 10
cm distance. The range hood doesn't attract it at all, even in the central filter: it just
barely holds it in place. On the other two filters it can't even manage that. Clearly the
air flow is nothing like what they claim. I wish I had thought of this comparison before
the technicians came.

Somehow I've always had difficulties with eggs. Fried eggs are never perfect, and in the
past the quest for perfection has cost me my job.
Nowadays Yvonne fries the eggs, but normally we eat boiled
eggs.

Eggs have changed since my childhood. In those days, they were almost invariably white, and
you could cut off the top cleanly and eat them. About the only issue was the cooking time.

Nowadays things are different. Eggs are almost invariably brown, but it seems that the
shells are much thinner now, and it's really difficult to cut the top off smoothly. I've
tried the alternative of breaking the shell and peeling the bits off, but that's a mess.

So how about poached eggs? I've done them before, of course, but there's nothing like a bit
of research. All recipes agree that poached eggs produce “streamers”. What do you do with
them? “Joy of cooking” doesn't say, so presumably nothing. The Constance Spry Cookery book
instructs you to put a clean dry cloth in your left hand, lift each egg into this hand and
cut them off with a sharp knife. It's quite specific about using the left hand, something
that Muslims wouldn't appreciate.

Across the English Channel,
Madame Saint-Ange make it very clear that you should hold the egg, after cooling, in
your right hand and cut off the streamers. There! No offended Muslims.

But the idea of discarding edible food offends me slightly. So when Yvonne bought some
non-stick silicone poaching pouches (for want of a better description), we tried that. Eggs
in pouch, pouch in boiling water, and we're away:

How do you get them out? There are two issues. First, the shape doesn't make it easy to
pick them up: you need to pick them up at three points. I tried chopsticks through the
holes, but it's difficult to handle 3 chopsticks. And then how do you get them out of the
form if they stick? Simple, reverse the form. A good idea, but in practice it didn't
deliver:

I've already commented on
the slow reactions of the new firmware for my Olympus OM-D E-M1. Wouldn't
it be a good idea to do a video of it? Yes, of course, and I tried yesterday. The results
were catastrophic: with the E-PM2 it's really difficult to get the focus right, and the best
I could do was out of focus.

Today I tried again. I still wasn't sure whether it was in focus, but it didn't matter: the
problem no longer occurred. So out of focus or not, here's the clip:

One of the least of my problems with the house has been that the joins between the flooring
tiles have oozed adhesive. We could scrape it off, but it's a warranty issue, so we left it
to the experts. Today Greg of Delta, whose surname proves to be Forte, came out and took a look. He brought some
solvent and left it with me, rather than doing the work himself. I'm a ambivalent about
that: on the one hand, it's his job, but on the other it's not much work, and standing there
watching him doing the job and moving all the furniture seemed at least as much work, so I'm
not too unhappy.

Greg has been here before. As I noted four months ago, the tilers were not
very happy with the floor, and Greg was quite happy with the success they had under the
circumstances.

As discussed, he also brought some trim with him for adjusting the height of the gap under
the doors. It was completely inappropriate: curved trim intended for holding down carpet at
the edges. And that's all he could get. Clearly Wayne didn't communicate the situation
very well. He agreed that the simplest solution would be to put in doors of the correct
height.

I don't know whether Wayne thought he was supposed to be the person to address the
transition in the en-suite bathroom:

You should view your letter as soon as possible. You may view your letter by going to:
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- the Australian Government Department of Human Services website and logging on to Centrelink services online.

For more information about online letters, go to the Australian Government Department of Human Services website and search for 'online letters' or go to the myGov website.

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And apart from a reference number in the Subject: line, that's all. The two
disclaimers are identical except for the line breaks. Confidential indeed! It's a form
letter telling me nothing except that they're too polite to send me the message directly.
Instead I have to log in with this emetic and slowmyGov interface. It
started well:

What do they mean, session has timed out? This is the first session I have started with
this instance of the browser. They clearly don't recognize when a session is complete.

Next I discovered that even spaces in the answers to the “secret questions” count. So I
suppose a particularly sneaky reply would have two spaces somewhere in the middle. Then I
followed the link. It took several minutes, but finally I was given an important document
(really: if I don't react, I could lose my pension) in PDF format. Sorry, people, this
infrastructure is far too flimsy and difficult to use to entrust important documents to it.

A Yes/No question, only, with the information that the answer was required. How
bureaucratic can you get? On, and it seems that MyPost (or is that MyPOST? They can't make
up their minds) has included a new hurdle. To use the service, you must have a mobile
telephone, be in a coverage area, and
have SMS enabled:

Basically, they've made themselves useless to me. Others at least allow sending a code to a
normal telephone number, but this one specifically excludes non-mobile numbers, presumably
because it wants to send an SMS. Goodbye MyPost.

Back to my.gov. Clearly there's no point in having them send me email. To my profile to
remove the “service”. But:

So after 15 minutes I had got nowhere. People, this isn't rocket science. Web sites of
this complexity have been around for over 10 years. Keeping DNS servers running is
simplicity itself. When will you get your act together?

Of course, the original question is: why didn't they just send the document as an
attachment? There is an almost valid reason: since it's confidential, they don't want to
entrust it to an unencrypted medium like email. So why not encrypt it? Ah, you can't do
that. Or at least you can't in the Microsoft space: I've been using encryption technology
in my email for decades. When is the Microsoft space going to catch up?

I've already noted that
Australia Post has an option to send you
tracking information on parcels. A couple of weeks ago I tried it with some parcels I had
sent. No response. Today I got one, though: a parcel delivered to me. So it seems
that this tracking information only works for parcels sent to me. What good is it to tell
me I have received a parcel?

In this diary, I change my real mail addresses to groggyhimself@lemis.com. On my
home page I mention the mail
address honigtopf@lemis.com. Both, of course, don't exist. And how about that, my
caution was warranted:

Over two weeks ago Duncan Jackson called me to tell me the replacement for the damaged solar panel would be
there by the end of the week (24 July 2015). It's still not there.
Sent him an email and asked him what was going on. Chromagen were looking at it, he said.

Shortly later a barely intelligible Alissa called from Chromagen. They had just now had a
report of the damage from O'Neill plumbing, and they needed to send somebody out to look at
it.

This isn't the first time that JG King have dropped the ball on following up on problems. I still don't have resolution
for any of the main problems I have mentioned, and I get the impression that they're
not even trying. I'll give them until tomorrow evening to resolve the stove issue, but it
looks like we're going to have to involve CAV.

Brett and Keith from Laser Plumbing (what a name!) along today to take another look at the solar hot water panel damaged
nearly 3 weeks ago.
They found that it was defective, of course, but also that the frost sensor had not been
connected properly, thus explaining the problem in the first place. That's good news, I
suppose: after they reconnected it, there's no reason to expect a repeat of the problem.
And they hope to have a new panel next week.

Trevor (surname unknown) and Duncan Jackson from JG King along today for the Defect Liability
Period Inspection that was due last week. There wasn't much to do: they finally filled in
this silly gap between the skirting board and the tiles. Here before and after:

I don't know which one looks worse; both show a complete lack of professionalism.

Apart from that, they adjusted the door catches so that they would no longer rattle when
it's windy—they say. I'm not convinced, but we'll see.

They also took another look at the range hood installation. I showed them the difference in
force between air conditioner and range hood, and Duncan went up into the roof to take more
photos. He thinks that some of the ducting is only 12.5 cm in diameter, and Trevor produced
a document saying that that's OK:

Both the specifications (in
HTML) and this
document (PDF) are on their web site; the former links to the latter. It's not the
only discrepancy: the
EAN specified
is also different. The HTML spec states 8017709156268, while the PDF spec states
8026493048550. It would be nice if they had put the EAN on the compliance certificate
inside the unit, but that would also have been too difficult:

These details are not very relevant to the problem, of course: they just show how little
attention the manufacturer pays to his own specifications. Duncan's not sure that the
ducting is 12.5 cm; when Wayne from Barclays came, he also inspected it and found no problem with the
diameter. He also checked it with recirculation, and the throughput was still inadequate.
So basically we're no further.

Another Brett along later, this time from Electrolux to look at our Westinghouse gas stove. He said
there was nothing wrong with it. I'm increasingly getting the impression that these people
are sent out to reject any suggestion of a problem. I pointed out to him that I can adjust
the flame much lower than the “minimum” setting by setting the regulator between “maximum”
and “off” (the latter on the right):

He fiddled with the adjustment and couldn't get it any lower, then claimed that it was
necessary to avoid the flame going out. What bloody nonsense! I had just shown him that
it's possible to set it lower. Then I showed him the results of trying to simmer a gravy on
those settings:

And he didn't find anything wrong with the first one either.

Finally I showed him the diagrams from the installation instructions (which he didn't bring
with him):

“But that's just a drawing”. Of course it's a drawing, you bloody idiot: it's from the
black and white installation instruction. But it's intended to show how to adjust the flame
size, and he can't just ignore it.

I pointed out that this kind of issue only applies to LPG connections. No, that's not the
case, he says. I can't prove him wrong, but if other plumbers tell me that the normal
setting for natural gas is at the other end, he can't possibly be right.

All in all, I'm more than a little annoyed by the whole matter. He's clearly trying to
block any objections. The trouble with this one is that there are no specifications to
point to, with the exception of the diagram above.

Last month Evan told me that
they didn't feel responsible for defects in the equipment they supplied: that's the
manufacturer's problem. I disagree: they recommended the equipment, and they supplied it.
Called up CAV and spoke to Heinz, who
agreed with me completely. For statistical purposes, he also wanted my post code and the
name of the builder. I wonder how JG King rate in the number of complaints.

That's what Microsoft does with its own formats! Not only that, but it seems that it then
corrupted the file, so I couldn't process it with other programs either. In the end I
downloaded it to eureka and processed it with OpenOffice. That's still painful, and for some reason
the form insists on mutilating my correct dates: “20 July 2014” gets truncated to
“20/07/14”, although the former is the preferred format for use by Australian Government
Agencies. But I suppose I should be grateful that the Microsoft space forms didn't reformat
it to “07/20/14”.

It's been nearly a year since we last made Bratwurst: the issues
surrounding our move didn't give us much time. But finally we're coming back to normal, and
today we made about 4.2 kg of them. We had casings enough for 5 kg, according to the
information on the packaging, but in fact the quantity was almost exactly right. We had
casings for 1, maybe 2 sausages (out of 59) left over:

One of the problems with our sausage machine is that it leaves a lot of sausage meat over at
the end. Today we weighed 260 g, or about 6% of the total. What do we do with it? In the
past we've frozen it, and then thawed it out for the next batch. But it doesn't look good.
It's grey, where the new sausage meat is pink. It's easy to see which were from the old
meat:

Not only is the colour unpleasant, but they don't seem to be as elastic as the new ones. We
ate them tonight, and in fact they didn't taste very different, but I think next time we'll
do something else with the leftovers.

Yvonne forwarded me this URL, a readable version of
this Microsoft
“Word” file, explaining how to live
with Borzois. It makes interesting
reading; anybody interested in the breed, including those misguided people who think that
they're vicious hunting dogs should definitely read it.

Since playing around with the cable connections last month, our TV reception has been
quite good, with almost no recoding errors. But
today the Al Jazeera news failed
catastrophically. I recorded simultaneously it on two different tuners and two different
program streams (both from SBS, however). And
in each case the recording was perfect for the first 15% or so, and then failed badly.
That's not the cables in the living room: some glitch at the transmitter? Or interference
to the north-west?

In Malaysia,
nasi goreng is a typical way to use
up cooked rice. I've spent some time looking through the Wikipedia page, which seems to
have been usurped by Indonesian ultranationalists: they have even removed references to the
Malay usage. So I looked at the Malay
page, which mentions a number of variants, including Nasi goreng kimchi. That's an
interesting idea, especially as Kimchi
tends to accumulate juices that normally just get thrown away. So I looked further and
found:

this recipe, which seems particularly simple, though the use of sugar seems
strange.

this one, which seems more along the lines of what I was expecting—but butter?
It also wants a fried egg.

I haven't really looked at this
one, but it appears similar modulo the use of much sesame.

And how was it? Deathly boring. Of course, I shouldn't have been looking at
Indonesian/Malay recipes at all. They're just rip-offs of the real Korean dish Kimchi bokkeumbap (김치 볶음밥).
But the original doesn't look much more interesting. So I'll have to look for some other
way to use up the leftovers.

It's August again, and though it's not as wet as last year, the ground water is
only about 20 cm below ground level. Today Yvonne bought a
pump on special at ALDI, and I tried using
that to pump water out of one of the solenoid boxes. It worked well—once. Now things are
back to normal:

Apart from that, I didn't do much of interest today: baking bread, tidying up, watching
online courses, preparing for dinner. But somehow it's hardly worth mentioning. In the
evening, Pene Kirk and Don Larpent over for dinner. And that was the day.

Chris Bahlo arranged a seminar on (horse) saddles and saddle fitting for today. Margaret
Swan (who lives about 450 km away) is here this weekend, and Nele Kömle also braved the over
100 km from Garvoc to attend. In
addition, Chris had advertised on Facebook and had a further 8 registrations from people round here.

Who came? Margaret and Nele. Not a single local person showed up. No apologies,
just no show. Is this typical of the Facebook mentality?

I didn't pay much further attention to him until the afternoon, when we took the dogs for a
walk. That's literally what he did: he didn't even break into a trot. On the whole, he was
looking very sorry for himself, and we truncated the walk. In the evening he was breathing
heavily, and it's clear that something is still seriously wrong. Looks like more vet
examinations.

Why did my new dirty water pump stop working? On examination, there was a large stone
caught in the bottom, and it had managed to pass a smaller stone through to the exit, where
it got stuck in the pipe junction. Clearly we'll need a cleaner trench for draining the
ground.

The current version of Hugin in
the FreeBSD Ports Collection is 2013.0.0, two
years old. It's always a pain to update the port, because of the dependencies. Tried today
and discovered that it didn't like the current version of libpano13. OK, no worries, let's
update it.

===> An older version of png is already installed (png-1.6.17)
You may wish to ``make deinstall'' and install this port again
by ``make reinstall'' to upgrade it properly.
If you really wish to overwrite the old port of png
without deleting it first, set the variable "FORCE_PKG_REGISTER"
in your environment or the "make install" command line.

OK, remove the old libpng and replace it with a new one (another new port). Try
again:

checking for png_get_io_ptr in -lpng... no
checking if PNG package is complete... no -- some components failed test
configure: error:
the png library must be installed on your system
but configure could not find it.

And sure enough, the patch got applied. Why am I still getting lib64? On the face
of it, it looks as if HSYS is not set to freebsd. What a pain these
configure scripts are! Things don't seem to have improved since “Porting UNIX Software” over 20 years ago.

Fifty years ago todayMalaysia expelled one of its
states, Singapore. It wasn't a happy
day. But looking back, it's amazing what a turnaround they managed. Things haven't stood
still in the Western world, but Singapore has changed beyond recognition. I'm still filled
with admiration for Lee Kuan Yew.

A chicken normally takes
between 50 and 55 minutes per kilogram at 180°, and like most chickens, this one weighed 2.1
kg. Chris is off grid, so she only uses her electric oven in an emergency. Instead, she
has a wood stove with an oven underneath it:

It's certainly a lot hotter than 180°. There's an almost illegible thermometer on the door,
but that doesn't matter: it suggested that it was too cool, so at best it's an ornament.
After 80 minutes, it was done, at least externally:

CJ Ellis has a strange problem with his VoIP
connection: it works normally for outgoing calls, but incoming calls are rejected. I took a
look at his ATA and
found nothing wrong. So called up MyNetFone support, who told me that the line wasn't registered. That's clearly wrong, since CJ can
call out with it. My guess at this stage is a misconfiguration at the server end, possibly
related to the port number: he had been receiving spam calls on port sip (5060), so
he had changed to 5061 (ostensibly sip-tls, but
without TLS). It's
almost exactly a year since he got the service; is that a coincidence? In any case, they're
going to have to take a look at his setup themselves, but I can't see what they will be able
to find.

Zhivago still didn't look much better this
morning. I had to force him to get up and go outside, where he appeared constipated. There
was clearly still something wrong, so followed up on Pene's suggestion to have him X-rayed.
Down in the afternoon to Golden Plains Vet
Practice in Bannockburn, where Kiera
Shine examined him. She noted a number of issues: elevated temperature (over 40°), enlarged
prostate, and of course his laboured breathing. She took him out for an X-ray and blood
tests. Alex Pearce, another of their vets, came back with the results. Not good: much
fluid in the lungs, and many tumours larger than the 5mm resolution of the X-ray unit. That
certainly explains the coughing.

What to do? We could have given him some painkillers and taken him home, but Kiera was
concerned that he wouldn't last the night, and it was clear that he wouldn't survive much
longer than that. But putting him down is pretty final, so I gave Pene a call, and she
discussed the matter with Kiera. Then she, too, recommended putting him down.

What a shock. He was only 9 years old. Leonid's father Yoshi is four years older than Zhivago. We thought he had some minor infection
that could be cured, and that he would have another few years' life in him. But it's clear
it had to be done. In retrospect, it's good that he was happy and healthy to within a week
of his death. But Yvonne is inconsolable.

Lilac is coming on 19 years old, and she has
been on regular doses of Meloxicam for
her arthritis, and the supplies were running out, so when we went to the vet we took her
with us, mainly in case they wanted to look at her. Yes, Kiera wanted to look at her, and
was worried about her kidneys—which are frequently endangered by long-term use of Meloxicam.
They took a urine sample. SG 1004 instead of more typically 1020 to 1040: kidney failure.
No more Meloxicam for Lilac. After her discussion with Kiera, Pene recommended having her
put down too.

Somehow we didn't get much done today. I spent some time bringing the web pages for
Lilac and Zhivago up to date, and Yvonne is gradually getting over her loss, but there's a bit of a numb feeling. Life
goes on.

How are our animals handling the loss of Lilac and Zhivago? So far, it seems, quite well.
Piccola has been wandering round a bit, but
it's not obvious that she's looking for Lilac. In my experience, that will take a few days.
And the dogs haven't shown much evidence that they're missing Zhivago—maybe. Yvonne went shopping today, and when she got back, as ever, Nikolai jumped into the back of the car. But first he
sniffed the floor of the loading area a lot: that's where the freshest scent of Zhivago is.
And earlier I had seen him in the lounge room:

A call from Farnaz of MyNetFone this
afternoon, wanting to speak to CJ regarding his fault. I explained that he wasn't here, so
she wanted his phone number. I explained that his phone didn't accept incoming calls, so
she read the ticket (finally) and told me that the reason he couldn't make any calls was
because his ATA wasn't
registered. I asked her to read the rest of the ticket and note that he can place
outgoing phone calls. Finally she agreed to send him email and get him to call them. About
the only sensible thing she said was that my suspicion that the change of port
from sip to sip-tls was not the cause of the problem. I still suspect a
misconfiguration in their network, but it's not clear what.

Our new oven has a “pizza” setting, heat from below and the fan. How do you set it?

"Pizza" is a combination of "Base Heat" and "Fan Bake" and offers you the combined
benefits of both functions. Heat comes from the elements surrounding the fans as well
as the clean heat element below the oven floor. The "Pizza" function is ideal for foods
that require cooking and browning on the base. It is great for foods such as pizzas,
quiches, meat pies and fruit pies. Simply place the food in the middle of the oven and
set the desired temperature.

And what temperature do I desire? I decided on 220°. Sure enough, it cooked in about 8
minutes. The canonical time is 10 minutes, and other methods have taken up to 25. Things
didn't look too bad:

The service started at 11:00. It takes about 2 hours to make the 170 odd km to get there,
so we left at 8:40. Just as well, too, since the traffic was particularly bad, and we got
stuck behind one truck doing 40 km/h for over 10 km. We were barely there on time.

The chapel was packed: I'd guess that there were 150 people there, and the eulogies were
surprisingly interesting. I knew that Ron had had an interesting life, but it seems that we
had just seen the tip of the iceberg. They should really publish it.

We skipped most of the subsequent refreshments and went shopping, coming back in plenty of
time for the burial itself. That was a sad event; Steve was completely heartbroken. Times
will be hard for him in the next few weeks, I fear.

Ron was active until the last. On Sunday last
week he showed his bitch Ginger, who won. In the evening, he was taken to hospital
for the last time. Coincidentally, this was the time that Zhivago first showed symptoms of his cancer. They'll
both be missed. Here a photo taken last month:

On the way back home, just before leaving the freeway at
Ballarat, the car's temperature warning
light went on. There was a service station a few hundred metres further on, so in there to
check. Looked like loss of coolant, of course, so the first thing was to top up the header
tank. It ran straight out the bottom!

Fortunately we weren't too far from town, and we got Chris Bahlo (fortunately in town and
able to knock off early for an emergency) to pick us up. While we were waiting, Yvonne discovered a voucher for roadside assistance, including towing
for up to 25 km. At the time I thought it wouldn't be much use, but of course now it's
exactly what we wanted. Everything went very quickly—they would have been there in 15
minutes—but Chris was there even more quickly, and we didn't want to hold her up, so we left
the car there until tomorrow.

I was really only needed to sign the form. In the process discovered that we had made a
good choice of car service people: the Sperbers are the only ones who issue free towing
vouchers. At least everything went smoothly.

On the way back, stopped at the nursery near the freeway exit to look mainly
for Grevilleas, but in the process
discovered an interesting plant, which I had been told was
a Leucadendron near the entrance:

Stopped in at the car service on the way home. It seems that we were trying to fill the
radiator in the wrong place, and we got the overflow instead. There wasn't in fact any
burst hose, though we had lost 2 l of coolant. Paul later replaced the filler cap, and
tomorrow he'll check if there was any damage.

I have my doubts as to how natural all this is. Looking into the forest, there are very few
flowers. It's almost as if somebody had planted them along the roadside. The
only Grevillea
bedggoodiana I have ever seen is also along this stretch of road.

We bought some German food at Fleischer's in Boronia
yesterday, including things that we usually make ourselves. Today we tried
the Bratwurst. Theirs are thicker than
ours, and also a little pinker, though that may be because we had frozen ours:

In the first photo, a sole Fleischer Bratwurst is at the top, and in the second in the
middle. The consistency was different too, presumably because they minced the meat finer.
Here a couple of slices:

The Fleischer Bratwurst have much less in the way of spices, and you can taste the
difference. But they're not supposed to be an special variety, while we aim for something
like the thüringer
Roastbratwurst, which is spicier. They're both good, but we prefer ours.

The other great German staple is bread, of course. Here ours (on the left) and theirs:

I note with interest that their bread is less uniform in texture, and in general less
aerated. What can't be seen there is that it's also much lighter. I cut two slices
of our bread, weighing 62.5 and 67.1 g (why such a difference when it's cut on a slicer?),
while the Fleischer slice weighed only 26.8 g. OK, it's smaller, but not that much smaller.
Our bread measures 11.5×13.5 cm; approximating to a rectangle that's 155 cm². The Fleischer
bread measures 12.3×8.7 cm. Approximating to an ellipse, that's 84 cm². Both slices are 9
mm thick, so the volumes are 140 cm³ and 75 cm³ respectively, and the densities are thus
0.46 g/cm³ and 0.35 g/cm³ respectively. That's a surprising difference.

One reason is presumably the moisture content. We toast our bread, and the Fleischer bread
toasts more strongly:

A letter from JG King today, saying
that there were no problems. The manufacturer's representatives had said so. I've already
commented in various places about the manipulation of the truth that they had to perform to
come to such an absurd conclusion, but it's looking more and more like legal proceedings,
particularly as the tone of the letter suggests lack of good faith.

Only two months ago we brought some of our plants over from Kleins Road, notably
a Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
and a potted lemon. The hibiscus was the worse for the cold. It flowered once and then
dropped most of its leaves. But it has made a good recovery, and today the first of the new
flowers opened:

With the exception of the bottom one, they're all Swedish. Henrik Johansson tells me that
the top one (10 SEK) is no longer
legal tender. Nor is the
10 markka note at the bottom; it
was replaced by the Euro over 13 years ago.

When did I get these notes? With Henrik's help discovered that most of the notes have a
clearly recognizable date on them: 1984 for the 10 SEK note, 1986 for the 50 SEK and 10
Markka notes. We decided that the date 1729 on the 100 SEK note was not the date of
printing, but the date of Linnaeus'
thesis Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, particularly since there's a mention
of Uppsala there too. This note seems
not to divulge its age.

The last time I was in Finland before
2002 was round 1990. That was also about the last time I was
in Sweden before this date. One way or
another, it seems that I have had these notes for 25 years.

In past years I've been amazed at how many flowers in the garden flower towards the end of
winter. But that was in Kleins Road, and though the garden in Stones Road has started off
well, it's looking a little tired now. The heavy frost last month didn't help: I'm
sure that several plants are dead. But we still do have some flowers:

One of the weirder entries in the BSD calendar files regards yesterday:

Aug 14 First Unix-based mallet created, 1954

We've puzzled about it in the past. The FreeBSD project has a member called Juli Mallett, but she was born over 30 years later, and she
doesn't understand the entry either. But Google keeps growing, and finally I found
this page, reaped by archive.org, via
this page. Finally the
mystery has been uncovered, but like so many, the result is less than exciting.

But there was a problem. The thumbnail doesn't look too bad, but in fact the light was so
poor that I ended up making a 1 second exposure, which even the E-M1 can't easily stabilize.
The larger versions of the image have clear camera shake.

That was with aperture priority exposure at f/8, so I switched to automatic, and got 1/20 s
at f/8. Still not ideal, but sharp enough:

Peter Jeremy is currently messing around with arcane net configurations. I haven't been
following carefully, but he mentioned that he is happy that his ISP doesn't block IP
protocol 41. That's a leading question, of course. What's protocol 41? Took a look
in /etc/protocols and discovered that
it's IPV6. OK, why not?

But then something else caught my eye:

# $FreeBSD: src/etc/protocols,v 1.22 2007/05/20 03:55:22 grog Exp $

That's my login. I can't recall ever having done anything with /etc/protocols. OK,
we have a date. What did I do on 20 May 2007? My diary entry
showed nothing. Is this an artefact of checking out the source tree
from CVS? Took a look
on stable, a more up-to-date system:

edwin is Edwin Groothuis, also on our IRC channel. Did we discuss it? Peter
Jeremy went looking through his logs; I have only been keeping mine since 29 June 2010 (eat your heart out, Facebook users). He found the logs, but no, I didn't discuss anything with Edwin on
that day.

OK, there's still the bug report. But that was
about LDAP, something that I really have
never touched. Yes, Edwin was involved in that too, and my commit message ended up in
there, but clearly it was only because I mentioned the number in my commit message. In
particular, this was net/112732, not config/112732.

Still more searching brought me to config/112723. How
about that, Edwin (at the time not a src committer) entered the PR, and I somehow
found it—not via IRC or mail. And I managed to put a typo in the commit message, and
subsequently forget that I had ever been near the file. But it goes to show the importance
of keeping long-term logs.

I recently received the fourth request to use it, from a Lydia who is opening a new cafe in
Jalan Pudu, KL.

While researching the photo legacy of the times, I had found some other photos, including
this one on Flickr by williewonker:

I had little doubt that it was in Jalan Mountbatten (now Jalan Tun Perak), looking
south-east towards Jalan Pudu. Robinsons department store is clearly visible on the left.
And behind that were two of my favourite haunts, Eastern Photographers and Williams music
shop. And then the bridge.

What bridge? I can't see any bridge there. Instead I see the UOB building with the complicated emblem on top (designed
to make it the tallest building in KL at the time; that always seems to have been important
in KL). It's a long way from the rest. Looking down Jalan Mountbatten in the other
direction, from the top of the IBM building:

The OUB building is to the right, outside the field of view in this photo; it's visible at
the right of the panorama above. The only building with this kind of construction on top is
another bank, the United Malaysian Banking Corporation, now part of RHB. And that was there at the time. Where is it now?
I had thought that williewonker's photo would have been taken from approximately the other
end of this view. That's certainly where Robinson's used to be, and the building looks
similar. It took me quite a bit of analysis to establish that yes, indeed, the UMBC
building is there. The emblem on the roof is just below the UOB emblem, and there's a sign
on the side of the building, just before the end of the picture. The green area at the end
of the road must be the transition to Jalan Pudu, where even today there's some green.

The perspective becomes clearer with a crop of the panorama, looking from the side:

Here we have the OUB building on the right, the UMBC building to the left
of St. John's
Cathedral, just below the radio tower
on Bukit Nanas, and much lower.
The Masjid Jamek is visible on the
left, and williewonker's photo would have been taken from just behind there.

Today was the last day of the Coursera course
“Epigenetic Control of Gene
Expression. It's been a tough course, but very interesting for a number of reasons:
it's held at the Melbourne University (in
the institute where Chris Bahlo's sister Melanie works), and it addresses an area that is
still relatively unknown, and it's well presented (though I get the feeling that the course
materials are a year old, an eternity in this discipline). But it's been keeping me busy
enough that I think I'll give Coursera a rest for a while.

How many symphonies did Haydn
write? I had to look it up: 41 or 43, depending where you look, though it's not clear if
that includes KV
444.

This evening we were listening to Radio
Swiss Classic, which we're doing increasingly frequently. It has an interesting
choice of less well known music. This evening there was
a bassoon concerto that I had never heard
before. Took a look at the ICY
information:

ICY Info: StreamTitle='Michael Haydn - Sinfonie Nr.14 B-Dur';

Huh? That's a concerto, not a symphony. What
does Wikipedia
say? No mention of solo bassoon. Just the movements:

Is that just this version, or is the Wikipedia page inaccurate? It would be nice to find
another version, but Naxos only has this one (presumably not coincidentally, the same one we
heard on the radio). In the meantime,this one is very pretty.

As if that wasn't enough, the next piece on the radio was also for bassoon:

Unfortunately, the Naxos music library has nothing at all by Böhner, though it manages a few
false positives based, apparently, on the name „Ludwig“. I wonder how much more interesting
music is waiting to be discovered.

Yvonne has been wondering how to tame them. Today a couple
of her friends, Karen and Joan, came to visit her.
They're German Shepherd Dog
owners, and that's where Yvonne met them, but they decided against bringing their dogs with
them. Not all dogs are as docile as our vicious hunting dogs.

Yvonne mentioned taming kookaburras to Karen, who told her that she had done it, and it's
easy. I can see some interesting photos coming up.

Yesterday's photos really need markup with arrows pointing to the features I mention in the
text. But how do I get them there? My standard processing software is DxO Optics “Pro”, but
that's not designed for that sort of thing. And most of the other photo software I've tried
is either incredibly complex, incredibly expensive, or difficult to use. Did some googling
and found this
article relating to GIMP using this plugin. Score one each for incredibly
complex and difficult to use, but then, it is GIMP. Score one also for “don't work
for me”.

On looking at alternatives, including serif (“This web page is not available The connection to www.serif.com was interrupted.”) and
inkscape (a
YouTube video showing nothing
much). inkscape had the irritating habit of shrinking the image and talking about
DPIs, as if that had anything to do with digital images. After messing around for a while,
Peter Jeremy pointed me at XPaint, which
was at least easier to use, though clearly I'll have to spend some time to become more
familiar with it.

Into Ballarat this morning to hear the
results of the blood test and abdominal ultrasound scan I had done two months ago. It took me the best part of 5 minutes just to register, and
based on my last appointment, I was expecting at least half an hour wait before I was seen.
But no, I had barely sat down in the waiting room when I was called, and taken right in to
see Dr. Turner (last time I had to wait again in a different corridor).

The results? Nothing interesting. Fat deposits in the liver, but not serious enough to
make an impression on the blood test results. So the usual: more exercise, less alcohol,
less sugar, lose a bit of weight. And I was out 30 seconds before my appointment was due at
12:00. I think that was the clue: as Dr. Turner said, “now we can get some lunch”.

I'm in the process of typing in my diaries from 50 years ago, something that presumably
interests nobody but myself. Today I did 13 October 1966 and
14 October 1966, and came across this entry:

Then over to Stoneleigh, and got the shock of my life in Yel's BJ: two new Pentaxes, a
110 model and “Metalica”, both with
electronic shutter, and bayonet mount!

I have no recollection whatsoever of this event, and had to go researching on the web to
compare things. Yes, there was a Metallica II prototype shown at Photokina that year. But
it was only a prototype, and it never went into production. It apparently looked like this,
just about the same as the Spotmatic:

The 110 model is a mystery. Pentax did manufacture
the Pentax Auto 110, but not for
another 12 years. And of course, how did a schoolboy in England come to be in possession of
either camera?

Yesterday's discovery of a
mention of a Asahi
Pentax110 camera in my diary of
13 October 1966 continued to intrigue me. I really couldn't find any
mention of it anywhere. Yes, there's a mention of a “Metallica II” prototype, though the photo shows that my spelling “Metalica” was correct, and there's no
mention of the suffix II either. But where was the 110? Aren't the magazines of the day on
line? No, it seems not.

The other question that puzzled me was the abbreviation “BJ”. What does that mean? I
wrote:

Then over to Stoneleigh, and got the shock of my life in Yel's BJ

We normally used the word “scob” to refer to where we kept things. Chaun (“Yel”) had a
study place in Stoneleigh, but his scob would have been in the common room, several hundred
metres away. I used that same study room in the previous term, but I can't recall what
storage we had, let alone what we called it.

Then I wondered if it might be the name of a magazine. Bingo! It's the British Journal of Photography. That clarifies the
most confusing thing: Chaun didn't in fact have the cameras himself, it was just a magazine
article. OK, where can I find it? The BJ doesn't have old issues on line (why not?). And
Google and friends found the Metalica, but not the 110 camera.

What about libraries? Tried the National Library of
Australia, but as the name implies, it tends to concentrate on Australian documents.
Then to the State Library of Victoria,
where I found various search tools, including free access to ProQuest. And sure enough, with some frobbing of the
sub-optimal search tools, found the issue in question, dated October 14, 1966 (a day after I
read it), on pages 911 and 912.

... the Metalica has a through the lens automatic exposure meter cross coupled to the
focal plane shutter. In this camera, Asahi have finally decided to take the step of going
over to the bayonet type mount, although all existing lenses for their 35 mm cameras will
fit via a screw adaptor [sic].

The shutter runs vertically, and is transistor controlled. The user has the choice of
auto or manual use. When set to auto, the shutter speed which is automatically determined
shows up in the viewfinder. On the manual setting, the exposure meter needle can be read
and the user's own choice made and set. ... The electronically controlled shutter enables
the rated shutter speed to be maintained through the working life of the camera, and the
linear relationship across the scale enables precise shutter speed intermediate settings
to be given. ... The specimen handled by the writer seemed very close to a production
model, with all details and engravings present, so that it may not be long before this
interesting camera is available.

So this the camera had optional aperture priority automatic exposure and electronically
controlled shutter speeds. I had forgotten how the speeds of the old mechanical shutters
could drift. But the review proved wrong in one point: the first production Pentax camera
with all these features was the K2 in 1975, nearly 10 years later, though it's not clear that even this camera had
the advanced shutter of the Metalica.

And the mysterious 110 camera? A figment of my abominable handwriting. It was 120, not
110! The camera in question was a prototype of the Pentax 6×7. What a let-down!

The latest person interested in using it is the Tedboy Bakery Cafe, who are opening a new outlet in Jalan Pudu, opposite the
Pudu Sentral bus staion.

Where's that? My mother used to have an office in Jalan Pudo in the late 1960s. I only
went there once or twice, and have only a vague recollection where it is; about the only
detail I recall is that the site next to the building was not built up.

Lydia tells me that there used to be a Shell petrol station on that site. By chance I found
an old and very poor map of KL, dating to December 1964 and published by Shell, and thus
illustrating the location of the Shell stations at the time:

The thick line through the middle of the detail is Jalan Pudu, and the second Shell station
from the left is the one that Lydia meant. And I'm pretty sure that's exactly where my
mother's office was.

In passing, the map has another function: it shows the old British names of the streets,
before they were changed to Malay names. Where's Jalan Mountbatten now? It's Jalan Tun
Perak. Where's Jalan Campbell? It's Jalan Dang Wangi. Jalan Weld? Now Jalan Raja
Chulan. It's really difficult to establish where many of the streets are that I mentioned
in my diaries of the 1960s.

Of course, my map of Kuala Lumpur
isn't the only one. Went looking on the web and found surprisingly few. In the end, did a
Google search for kuala lumpur
photos 1960s, which brought back a surprising number of photos, many of which looked
very familiar:

I suppose there are only so many ways you can take photos of landmarks, but I went to
compare with my own. Sure
enough, of the 14 photos in that extract, 5 are mine. No acknowledgement. No query in
advance. I have copyright conditions that allow
that—for a fee of $10,000 per image. And it's not just one breach. The photos in this
selection are on the web sites lowyat.net, vintag.es (this one almost only my photos), ehoza.com,
anakwilayah.wordpress.com and even Flickr. This last
comes up with something like an attribution:

As a hoarder, I have all sorts of old things that I don't use, going back over 55 years.
Today I found an old
bass recorder that
I got in 1960 or 1961, and which I managed to damage beyond repair the day that I got it:

It was made in Germany and shipped
to Malaya, where the humidity
caused the cork joint to swell to the point that just forcing the top joint onto the middle
joint caused it to split. The white marks on the surface are candle wax that I used to
attempt to seal the split. I was never able to use the instrument properly, but I still
have it.

Others are useful, and in particular I have a number of old clothes going back nearly that
far. Last week was Ron
Frolley's funeral, so I dragged out my old funeral suit. Times have changed:

When did I buy that suit? It must have been the best part of 40 years ago, when two of my
wife Doris' uncles died. It would be certainly well over 35 years ago. Have I really got
that much fatter in that time? I ended up wearing another suit that I had bought in 1990,
which still fits me, so the bloat must have taken place in the 1980s.

It was a pretty nasty suit anyway. Apart from the cheap cloth, it had bell-bottoms
reminiscent of the 1960s:

Unpacking the removal cartons in the “music room” (or should we call it “library”?) is
progressing, and in the process I keep finding old stuff. Today there was a collection
of old computer boards representing most of my first three computers.

I must have got the first machine some time in April 1977. It was made by Kontron and designated “kit”. It was a 4
MHz Z-80 based single board computer with
256 bytes each of RAM and ROM, and also serial and parallel interfaces, all on a
“Eurocard” board
10×16 cm in size:

The CPU and ROM are missing on this board. The parallel port was a Z80 PIO, a chip I came
to hate. I seem to remember something about no status registers. If an interrupt came and
you didn't handle it immediately, there was no way to know that it had ever happened.

This board shows a number of hacks I made. The transistor next to the 8251 was, I think, to
convert from RS-232 to the 20 mA current loop
that Tandem terminals used. The
DIN connector was to connect a tape cassette recorder, which I still have and may photograph
some time.

All in all, for the day it was a surprisingly compact system. But the problems outweighed
the advantages. The ROM monitor was so buggy that it was just about useless. I patched it,
but there's not much you can do in 256 bytes without the ability to re-assemble the code.
And clearly it needed more memory. The backplane had provision for 5 cards, so that was
possible, and I designed and built both RAM and ROM boards with wire-wrap technology:

I didn't use this machine much: it was far too limited, and the proprietary bus meant that I
couldn't buy extension boards except from Kontron. In contrast to the kit, the other boards
were very expensive. On the other hand, in the USA they were building relatively cheap
systems based on the S-100
not-quite-standard, so the next two machines were S-100 based. The photos are there, but I'll describe them later.

Chinese food this evening, and we decided that we needed a prawn dish. How do you cook
prawns? All the recipes I know fry them, frequently very short deep frying. But that
requires precise timing, and I'm not sure that it's optimal. Today I tried sous vide instead, cooking them at 43°.

Success! The prawns tasted cooked, but juicy and not hard. Used them to make a fake
chile prawn recipe.

Somehow we need to teach Chris Bahlo's dog Fyodor how to behave. They came along this
evening, Chris for dinner, and Fyodor, it seems, to mark his territory. That's the third
time he's done that. We need to find a way to stop him.

Of course, I changed the email addresses. Mine is easy: groggyhimself@lemis.com,
which also serves as
a honeypot. But I changed
his to a fictive gmail address.

Bad idea. It wasn't that fictive after all, and the real owner contacted me today,
justifiably complaining about the fact that he was made to look like an idiot, but also that
he was getting spammed as a result. Why did I do that? In any case, my new fake email
address is notarealaddress@example.com. My apologies to the fake Mark Teel.

As I mentioned yesterday, it
proved impractical to expand my Kontron kit computer, I only had 1.25 kB of memory, and expanding it would have been
really expensive. Then I saw an advertisement
in Byte: 32 kB of memory on four
boards for only $790! The problem was that it was for
the S-100 bus. But that was so much
cheaper that I decided to migrate. It wasn't all progress: in those days the S-100 bus was
so flaky that it was difficult to run
a Z80 faster than 2 MHz—and that where
my Kontron CPU managed 4 MHz! But in the course of time I built up a reasonable system.
Here's the motherboard:

This was the first of two S-100 machines, and today it's difficult to be sure which boards I
used in which machine, but I think the following is relatively accurate. I bought four
8" floppy disk drives. Here's the controller:

The pre-populated chips appear to be bus interface logic and a couple of primitive parallel
ports. The mess of resistors and transistors on the cable connector are almost certainly a
20 mA current loop adapter.

I also built a ”console“ for the machine, in the days when that meant a set of switches and
LED display:

The switches were on a calculator keyboard that connected to the orange DIP connector at
bottom right. The 16 LED display was the address bus, and the 8 LED display the data bus.
I had switches that allowed stepping single cycle and single instruction executions.

The 32 kB of memory only half filled the address space. I ultimately increased this, though
it's no longer clear by how much, nor with which board. I needed to leave space somewhere
for a boot PROM. One candidate could be this board, but even when fully populated it would
only have offered 8 kB:

But the other boards I built had more than 32 kB, so they were probably for the next
machine. I have some recollection of a dynamic memory board by SD Sales, which I don't see
here. If my memory serves me, I bought it in the hope that its would work with the SD Sales
CPU board, but I think a considerable amount of the patch wiring on the CPU board was to get
the timing right.

This board may have been a replacement for the previous ROM board, with the added advantage
of a PROM burner, though I'm not sure I ever got that to work. The PROMs are 2708s, 1 kB
each, so this board needed a 4 kB hole in the address space.

The next one puzzles me. Clearly it's an I/O board, but I already had one. It has two
8251A USARTs, 2 8255 parallel port chips (a total of 48 bits of I/O; where are the
connectors?) and an 8253 timer chip. Did I ever use it?

I've had two near-failures with my sourdough rye bread over the last few months, on 4 June and 11 July. The next failure was
thus predestined for 18 August, but it wasn't until yesterday that I started a new loaf.

Why should this happen at regular intervals?
Superstition? Superstition defines
superstition as beliefs that explicitly contradict natural science. I don't like that
definition. The Oxford English Dictionary has
many more, including superfluity and excessive scrupulousness, but it seems that it, too,
roots superstition in religion. I think this is too short-sighted a view: for me,
superstition is based in attempts to explain things you don't understand. It's not until a
real, contradictory explanation comes along that it can be proven wrong.

Today's expectation has a rational explanation: I bake bread about every 12 days, and I have
three different starter strains that I use in rotation, so every 36 days or so I repeat the
starter strain. On 4 June I used starter F13 and created starter F14 with it. On 11 July I
used starter F14 and created F15 with it. And today I used F15.

Why use a suspect starter? I wasn't sure that it was the starter: in each case I had tried
to force the bread to rise faster than normal, because I had something to do in town. Today
I didn't, so I tried it normally. As a precaution I mixed the loaf very early, and it was
in the oven to rise by 9:35. And it needed the time: after 9 hours it had barely risen
enough to be acceptable. So there's definitely something wrong with strain F. I won't use
it any more.

Looking back at my records, it seems that I started strain F on 2 February 2014, from strain B and after the untimely demise of strain F (which only made 3
iterations). Strain B is now also defunct: it seems that starter B16, created on
15 March 2014, didn't make it.

Most of the dead starters were spectacularly dead: mouldy or otherwise useless. This is
the first time I've had one that has Just Slowed Down.

We cook almost everything from scratch, a far cry from today's fast food. In fact, so far
that there's a middle way: buy food at least partially prepared and finish it at home.
We're trying some of that in the hope of finding something worthwhile—pies sound like a good
choice, for example.

I built my third computer in 1980. It was also
an S-100 bus machine, this time with an
Intel 8086 processor. This was very
much cutting-edge technology at the time, and there wasn't even an operating system for it.
For whatever reason, Gary Kildall
of Digital Research wasn't
overly keen on releasing CP/M-86, and so
the offer I had, from a small company
called Seattle Computer
Products, was a two board set with their own operating system
called 86-DOS.

I was a little dubious about that, and some time round October 1980 I called the company and
spoke with Tim Paterson. He told me
that he had absolute confidence that 86-DOS would survive. “We have an order from a really
big company. If I told you how big, you'd know who it was”. The company
was IBM, of course, and 86-DOS developed
into PC-DOS
and MS-DOS. But that wasn't announced
until nearly a year later, and when it was, it was just an 8088 running at 4.77 MHz, no
comparison with my 8 MHz 8086.

This board contains an 8251 USART and some
parallel port that I don't recognize—presumably performed by the SSI chips at right centre.
The AM9513 is apparently a timer chip, and there are
two Intel 8259A interrupt controller
chips, suggesting more than 8 interrupt levels. There's also a (boot?) ROM. What's missing
is the floppy controller. It seems that I now only have one controller board; maybe I
swapped it from machine to machine as I used them. I would certainly have done that with
the terminal. Here's the Delta floppy controller again:

I'm not sure which of these I used. They were all based on a
the Intel 8202 dynamic RAM
controller chip, which had the interesting feature of not being fast enough for the chips.
I had untold grief getting the thing to work.

But we weren't in a position to confirm that until today. Now how do I get hold of Brett?
I've already tried dozens of time to call him on 0403 510 843 about the failed paint job in the
troughs, but I think he recognizes my phone number. I wonder if he would answer if somebody
else called him to tell him about the problem.

Brett Chiltern has never been an easy bloke to contact, but now it's proving completely
impossible. Yesterday evening my last attempt went straight to “voicemail” (a stupid voice
non-recognition system that turns my message into an
unintelligible SMS message), so he was either
using the phone, or, more likely, had turned it off.

Either way, even if I was really unlucky in getting hold of him, he should have a whole list
of call attempts that should alert him to the fact that somebody's trying hard to get hold
of him. What do I do now?

A surprising number of people in Dereel
can't get NBN access. Some, like Stewart Summersby, are
in a dip and have no adequate visibility (“line of sight”) to the tower. But it seems that
a large proportion of the problems are due to trees, which are up to 25 m high.

But wait. Before building the tower, people came out here and took a look. They saw the
trees. They saw the lie of the land. And they decided on a location for the tower, along
with a coverage map, which currently looks like this:

The map keeps changing, and is wildly inaccurate, as I've commented in the past, but the updates don't show
the reality of the areas with demonstrated lack of coverage. The map can't even show the
location of the tower correctly:

The real location is about 300 m north west, on the other side of the road junction.

I get good coverage, but one of the people who doesn't is 260 metres north of us, also on
Stones Road, roughly where the bullseye of the red mark is. Why can't they get it? They
have trees round the house. But I'm pretty sure that they would get good reception from the
corner of their property, the corner with Progress Road: the only trees between there and
the tower are the same ones that we have to contend with. Unfortunately, the installation
crews are only instructed to install on top of a building.

To facilitate the Government's objectives, NBN Co will roll out the NBN to all Australian
premises using a combination of technologies.

OK, that includes satellite. It's quite possible that our neighbour really does have NBN
satellite. But why? The cost of installing a satellite dish is comparable to the cost of
installing a mast. The prices to the consumer are the same (for a 12 Mb/1 Mb link), but the
operating costs are incomparably higher. And there's still the issue of latency, which
makes even a reliable satellite connection the worst choice by a long way.

The Australian Government is committed to completing the National Broadband Network and
ensuring all Australians have access to very fast broadband as soon as possible, at
affordable prices, and at least cost to taxpayers.

Before anybody says that the new government has changed all that: no, this letter was signed
by Malcolm Turnbull
and Mathias Cormann. So why
aren't they even thinking about the fringe cases that evidently didn't get adequately
addressed when setting up the Dereel tower?

I've been following up on a lot of old stuff lately. The most interesting for most
people—and then not overly—would have been my computer
stuff of 35 years ago, but I've also been completing entering my 1966 diary. It's been instructive: on the one hand, I recognize
myself as I am today, but on the other hand it's clear how many stupid things I did at the
time. I don't think I'd want to be that age again.

And somehow that's enough. I should be doing something now. What? I've finished my epigenetics course, getting a
surprisingly good grade. It seems that out of the 15,000 people who started, only 110
finished the final (necessary) assignment, and I came out pretty much at the top of the
list. It doesn't have any significance except for personal satisfaction, but that's enough.
And that's also enough Coursera courses for
the moment.

But how serious is the flood of refugees? It seems that it's nothing compared to what
happened to Germans after the Second World War, up to 14 million of
them. I suppose just about everybody knew a refugee in the post-war period. One of them
was my father-in-law. Another (from a later flight) is my wife. But they all got treated far more humanely than the current wave, despite the extreme
hardships of the time. Shame on the Australian Government in particular for their inhumane
handling of refugees.

Replacement? The idea was to only have two dogs, and we had only increased to three because
we wanted two dogs of roughly the same age when Zhivago died. Now he's dead, and we had the
dogs.

But there's more. Ron Frolley, the breeder, is also dead, and this was his last litter. No
more Zolotos, as far as we can see. The puppy we were offered was really the very last to
be had. So in the end I agreed, and we headed off
to Warrandyte, the third time in
five weeks, to pick up Zoloto
Pitch Black, whom we will call Sasha or
Alexandr.

We didn't stay long—Yvonne had an idea of getting back home
for lunch. Back home, I had intended to get some video of him meeting the other two
vicious hunting dogs. The first video was bearable:

Then I went round the back and let Nikolai and Leonid out. They were jumping for joy to
see me again, of course, and then it started pouring with rain. So instead of letting them
sniff each other across the fence, I let them in together. Bad idea. Sasha was
terrified, and ran off screaming his head off. The other two quickly lost interest, but the
harm was done:

How do you get from Dereel
to Warrandyte? Let me count the ways.
Warrandyte is on the other side
of Melbourne from Dereel, and we have
the choice of fighting our way through the west of the city (thanks, State Government, for
spending hundreds of millions of dollars to cancel the freeway extension that
would have made it bearable), or drive round to the north-east end of the ring road and then
fight our way across country for another excruciating 20 km
from Watsonia North to Warrandyte.

Today we travelled via Watsonia North with two different GPS navigators, each of which
wanted to go a different way once we left the freeway. I took the advice of the new one on
the way there, though at one point the old one suggested avoiding the narrow, curving road
where we got stuck behind a truck last time. How about that, the road it suggested was wide
and straight. How could the new navigator make such a ridiculous mistake when I asked for
the fastest route?

So on the way back we took the advice of the old navigator. No overview, of course, no idea
in which direction we were going. It wasn't until we were nearly at the Eastern Freeway
that we realized it was taking us through the middle of town. And by then it was too late.

The only interesting thing about the matter, apart from the fact that there was little
difference in time, was that the new navigator wanted to turn off in some inappropriate
direction at least 10 times. Is this an issue with the maps? More investigation required,
but somehow GPS navigators are still not what they should be.

It's been over five years since I bought
my first GPS navigator. Since then I have bought two more, not counting the Android tablet that can
also run GPS navigation apps. After that time, I still have serious issues with them.

What do I want from a navigator? Here's a start:

At the very least, I need a substitute for paper maps, for whatever purpose I want to
use them.

I want to be able to plan trips. Start here, go there.

When I'm on the road, I want it to tell me where I am and where I'm going.

The navigator should calculate the optimum route. What's optimum? A good map (look at
the old Michelin maps for an example)
will give you an idea of the road conditions and restrictions such as tolls.

Getting beyond the paper map paradigm, there are lots of things that navigators can do
that paper can't. The obvious one is current road conditions. For that you need some
online functionality.

It should be easy to use when driving, meaning a minimum of interaction on the part of
the driver. I find that the best display shows the next 2 or 3 km on the freeway, or
several hundred metres on slower roads. But it should be easy to get an overview of
other views, like an overview map or a summary of parameters such as distance to go
and ETA.

There are many others, of course, like speed cameras and amenities along the road.

And how do they perform? At the moment I have maps, three navigators, Google Maps and my
Android tablet. The 3 navigators all run various versions of software by NNG (formerly Nav N Go; clearly they have tired of the name
too). I started with that, and after my ALDI navigator died, I compared it with big
commercial names, I found that it had features that the big names didn't. So I bought
another with effectively the same software (the oldest of the three under discussion). It's
now four years old, the
battery is dying, and the maps are out of date. Buy new maps? Why? They're more expensive
than the navigator. So I bought a new one, running iGo primo. What version? No idea.
They have changed all the menus, and there's no obvious way of finding it. In general, I'm
not very happy with it; it seems to be a step backwards.

So when ALDI had a new one on special, it seemed worth trying. It also runs NNG software,
but this time it's Go Cruise 11.4.06. And all the menus are different again! In
particular, I can't find most of the menus that the first navigator has. It appears that
each successive iteration scrambles the menus and throws some of them away, rather
like musical chairs, a clear
violation
of POLA. They've
managed to make the thing completely useless for me. Have they been bought out by a big
name and forced to make themselves uncompetitive?

Substitute for paper maps: this works, up to a point, with some of the navigators. The
oldest of my three can show an arbitrary map, but only with menu:

That's actually not too bad. The problem here is that it uses Open StreetMap, and round here the coverage is
vestigial. I'm used to map applications not finding my new address in Stones Road, but
these maps don't know Stones Road at all, nor most of the other streets in Dereel:

Still, MapFactor comes with a choice of TomTom maps, and maybe that would be better.

Planning trips. The current breed of GPS navigators are very bad at this. Very few
will allow you to set a start anywhere except where you are. If you're inside the house
the night before, you probably don't have a GPS signal. What do most navigators do?
Refuse to plan at all, because they don't know where they are. My old navigator allows
me to set a start address as well, and so does MapFactor. Then you get an overview like
this:

At that scale, about the only thing I can see is that both want to take me through the
middle of Melbourne. At least the MapFactor map can be stretched, and potentially that
would make it useful.

When you're on the road, they should give you a good feeling of where you are. But
newer navigators don't even show the direction you're travelling in. The result is that
you don't really know where you are. Just trust the navigator! That's how we ended up
coming back the wrong way yesterday. The oldest navigator at least has the option to
display the direction, as does MapFactor. But it would be nice to have a one-touch
option to display the route and where you are on it.

Which route should I take? All of them allow the choice between fast and short, and
some also offer “easy” and “economical”. But how accurate are they? Yesterday's trip
round Melbourne showed wildly
different ideas of what constitutes “fast”, and they can't all be blamed on the maps.
Without understanding the algorithms, it's difficult to decide what the problem is. But
in the past I've
repeatedly found routes
so suboptimal that they could only be blamed on software bugs. Whatever it is, this
kind of navigation “aid” is not worthy of the name.

Current road conditions: none of my navigators has online functionality, so I can't
address this one.

Easy to use when driving: None of them. The oldest navigator is probably
the easiest, but that's maybe only because I know it best. The Android offerings seem
particularly poor in this respect.

Gradually I'm seeing a trend. Five years ago GPS navigators weren't new—I had seen one in
action in July 2000—but I got the feeling that they still needed to mature. Yes, they've
changed—for the worse. Why? Lack of documentation, perhaps? People don't use the more
complicated functions because they don't know about them? And if nobody uses them, why
maintain them? In any case, after 5 years I'm no closer to finding an ideal navigation
solution.

I've had my Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis for nearly 7 years, and it has had its
ups and downs. The Wikipedia page claims that Hibiscus don't tolerate temperatures below
10°, but that's clearly nonsense: this one is a cutting of a bush outside my uncle's house
in Camberwell, where it's
subjected to near-0 temperatures every winter. And this one has had its share of such
temperatures, most recently three months ago, after which
it shed most of its leaves. But being inside has changed all that, and now it's flowering
more heavily than I've ever seen:

In the past we had some misguided neighbours, coincidentally owners and breeders of hunting
dogs, who consider our dogs to be “vicious hunting dogs”. Apart from the fact that
it's completely ridiculous in the case of our dogs (but not one of theirs), the question
arises: are hunting dogs typically vicious? Chris Bahlo observes that
her Borzoi is the only one of the three
which is gentle. The other two
are Maremma sheep dogs, and they
could be vicious with strangers—or indeed with each other.

And then there are others,
like German Shepherd Dogs,
who are also not always easy to get on with. Why? When you think about it, it seems
reasonable that sheep dogs should be aggressive: they're there to protect the herd. Hunting
dogs, on the other hand, hunt together, so they need to get on with each other. I'm sure
somebody has written more on this subject, but the first recognition for me is that hunting
dogs are less aggressive than sheep dogs.

As for the character of our dogs, we had visitors today: Nele Kömle with her son Nelson—the
first time I had seen him—and Jen and her daughter Leonie, two more horsey people who had
come to inspect Gneisti, the
new Icelandic stallion that
Margaret and Nele (really Magda) have just had received from New Zealand. While they were
at it, they came over to look at Sasha. And once again, Jen and Leonie were amazed by the temperament of all three dogs.

In passing, it seems that I haven't seen Nele for nearly 18 months. She's been at Chris'
place a couple of times, but never made it here.

It seems that Najib Razak is in
trouble for corruption. I don't know how it will work out, but I note that I met him for
the only time 51 years ago today. And as I noted at the
time, my father said of him and his younger brother:

It has been six weeks since
the frost damaged one of our solar hot water panels. On several occasions people promised a
replacement within a week. Last week I sent Duncan Jackson a mail message, but there's
still no reaction. Today I sent another stiff one to Wayne Jones, who arranged a phone call
from Chromagen, the strangely named
manufacturer of the panels. A couple of hours later I got a call from Alana asking me which
choice I wanted.

Huh? But she claimed to have sent me a letter last Tuesday. She sent it again by email.
The address is one of the better ones:

The name is wrong, the street number is wrong, and the post code is wrong. At least they
got the name of the town right. But is this enough to explain non-delivery? And why did it
take them nearly 3
weeks, why didn't they call me, why didn't JG King call me? And why did they send it to that
address when the file name
is 29 Stones Road, Dereel VIC 3356.pdf?

And the date? It may have originally been written on 25 August, but this version can't have
been sent any earlier than 27 August:

The prices are chargeable to JG King, so that's not of importance. But what is a
TZ58/1800-20R? She attached a couple of data sheets which described complete systems, not
just the “EVAC TUBE”. But there was no mention of TZ58/1800-20R, just SR20, SR30 and SR40.
Rang back and asked for a call-back. After 2 hours nothing had happened, so I called again
and waited, speaking to mumble, who somewhere along the
line claimed that the TZ58/1800-20R and the SR20 are the same thing. OK, that's obvious.
And how does the thermal performance correspond? It's not in the spec sheet, of course:

She didn't understand the question, so I said that I wanted to know how much power I would
get out of each panel, and how it compared to what I have. Ah, I had that wrong. The
power I get out of the system depends on the tank, not on the panels. And I should just
accept the suggestion: the people who wrote it know what they're doing.

I asked to be connected to somebody who could explain it to me, and she connected me
to mumble2, who sounded a little more intelligent, but
who also couldn't tell me what I need to know: for that we need to speak to the R&D
people. Finally she agreed to get Walter to call me back.

Walter called me back, but he couldn't tell me either. People, this is the single most
important thing about the panels! Why don't they even understand the question? He
confirmed that the TZ58/1800-20R was the same as the RS20, um, SR20, and the only
performance information he could give me was STCs.

What's an STC? Most certainly not a metric unit. He wasn't sure, and said something about
Small Technology Certificates, which proved to be a government programme. It seems (though it's not immediately obvious from the web
page) that the number of certificates corresponds to the power output. OK, so what are the
STCs for the two alternatives? That depends on where I live and what kind of
storage tank I have. For Ballarat and a
400 l electric-boosted tank I need (mumble mumble) 2 20R panels, which will give me 34 STCs.
Alternatively with the ones I have I need 3 panels, which will give me (mumble mumble) 36
STCs. What if I take a 40R panel? There's no such thing (see above). Oh yes, that's what
we call 2 20R panels. What about a 20R and a 30R? Sorry, no can do, we don't have STCs for
that.

By this time I felt like screaming. Chromagen doesn't know its own specs! It doesn't know
its own part numbers, and it uses different numbers for the same thing. The only measure is
yet another of these stupid government programmes that don't really tell you anything, like
the stupid star ratings for
houses, which are clearly
incorrectly documented. I said thank you, hung up, went out and tried to relax.

Looking later on the web, I found this page,
which suggests, based on this document, conveniently not accessible, that evacuated tubes are the way to go,
giving graphs:

Based upon solar insolation of 296W/m2 and an ambient temperature of 9.9 degrees Celsius in
Melbourne, the Hills Esteem evacuated tube solar collector is on Average 163.5% more
efficient per m2 of aperture over the flat plate solar collector.**

Summer: Based upon solar insolation of 861W/m2 and an ambient temperature of 19.8
degrees Celsius in Melbourne, the Hills Esteem evacuated tube solar collector is on
average 51.5% more efficient..**

OK, modulo markup, incomplete specifications of the conditions (what temperature are we
heating to?) and implicit advertising, this looks like just what I want. In particular,
the graph for winter is very compelling, though some of the boundary conditions don't make
sense. In summer with ambient temperatures of 20°, they measure efficiency of less than
100% when heating the water to 0°. So how trustworthy are the other values?

Of course, we're not home yet: the areas are different. Fortunately I have some information
on that: two SR20 (or whatever) panels have an aperture area of 3.76 m², and the flat panels
have an aperture area of 6.42 m², 70% more. To get a useful water temperature of 45° in the
winter the evacuated tubes have approximately 75% efficiency, or 296 × .75 W/m², for a total
of 835 W. The flat panels have about 17% efficiency, 296 × .17 W/m², a total of 323 W, only
about 39% of the performance of the evacuated tubes. So it seems that the evacuated tubes
win in the winter.

And in the summer? The flat panels win (58% vs 85%, adjusted to 99% for the flat panels).
But does that matter? The assumptions are for 861 W/m², so the actual power for the
evacuated tubes would be 861 × 3.76 × 0.85, or 2.7 kW. Assuming that the insolation lasts
for 12 hours, that would be 33 kWh, or about 118 GJ. Heating a litre of water from 20° to
45° needs 105 (25 × 4.2) MJ, so this would be enough to warm 1000 odd litres of water.
Clearly that's more than enough.

Why do I have to do all this? That's what the vendors should be doing for you. Instead
they don't even give you the information on the spec sheets.

Considerable commentary on IRC today about my last rant on GPS navigation. Andy Snow
said that Google Maps on Android was the answer to
all my issues. That hasn't been my experience in the past, but it was worth trying again.
Tried the route from here to Steve Zuideveld
in Warrandyte. It gave me a nice,
clean map of the start of the journey, with directions on the left, just like I know from
Google maps on a real computer:

But how do I show the whole itinerary? Shrinking the map with two fingers works, but it's
not what you want to do while driving. The other day I had suggested a single touch
somewhere, but I can't find a way to do that. Still, the map looked good—at first:

Is that some setting? Tried the settings, but found nothing beyond the fact that it
reverted to the initial view round Dereel.
That's an absolute knockout: the very least that I can expect from a navigation application
is that it chooses a sane itinerary.

Strangely, people on IRC didn't see it like that at all. Andy Snow pointed out that I live
in the middle of nowhere. And Edwin Groothuis pointed out that I know the area, so I don't
need a navigator.

I'm amazed. There are so many things wrong with this viewpoint:

Dereel isn't exactly the back of beyond. It's quite close
to Melbourne, and in fact not
nearly as far from a capital city as where Andy lives.

The maps are in fact quite detailed (and I now discover they have finally removed some,
but not all of the non-existent roads round Dereel). The real issue is that the
application doesn't calculate the routes correctly, not that it doesn't know the
alternatives.

I may know my way round Ballarat, but does every user? And if I catch it calculating
seriously sub-optimal itineraries here, how do I know that it won't do so in places that
I don't know?

Andy then decided that I must have an older version of the maps app (updated yesterday). Or
my Android is too old. But that's missing the point: should I go out and buy a new tablet
just because my version of Google Maps is broken? Who says that the newer versions are any
better? Looking at the maps on a real computer, I at least get an overview:

But it still routes me around Ballarat, so it's clearly not an out-of-date version.
Interestingly, though, the time estimates are almost exactly correct. But where are the
alternatives? This map shows three alternative routes, but not the optimum route calculated
by other programs. And this particular one (captured later) shows a route
via Geelong, whereas before there was
only a route bypassing Ballarat. Arguably that's taking traffic conditions into account,
though it shows that the route is two minutes longer.

Was that the only bug? What about this horrible twisty road that the new navigator took us
down three weeks ago? At
least Google Maps (on a computer) can show it and its fast counterpart:

This is unbelievable: of the two alternatives, it chooses the worse, although it calculates
it to be longer and slower. And savour the second alternative (11 min; 12 min without
traffic). Apart from that, the real times are vastly different, at least with even mild
traffic.

So: back to my six criteria:

A substitute for paper maps. Yes, Google Maps does this relatively well, and
I've been using it like that for a long time.

Plan trips. Yes, with reservations below.

When I'm on the road, I want it to tell me where I am and where I'm going.
Partially. I can't get an overview easily.

Current road conditions. I didn't test that, but it's reasonable to assume that
it works.

Easy to use when driving, meaning a minimum of interaction on the part of the
driver. No, not at all.

In passing, there's another criterion that didn't occur to me the other day: I want to be
able to enter multiple destinations and have the navigator work out the sequence for me
(think of weekly shopping trip). Google Maps can calculate multiple destinations, but I
can't see any way to optimize them. My el-cheapo navigators can all do that.

So why do other people think it's a solution? Andy wasn't the only one who disagreed with
me: just about everybody did. But Andy had the most obviously (to me) wrong views. Maybe
it does help in congested city traffic, but there are other apps that do what I need better,
and I don't think they're good enough.